DDA

When Is the Best Time To Pray? A Former Priest Weighs In

None of what you’re about to read applies to you if you don’t believe in God. God does not mean the burly grandfather figure with an impressive beard and a golden pitchfork. Maybe you believe in super-connectivity, or the Transcendental Attractor. Also, you will consider this article to be absolute shit if you don’t like or appreciate orgasms.

At one of my favorite little Los Angeles coffee shops, a man with short salt-and-pepper colored hair asked me what I was reading. He mentioned he was a former priest, and that he really liked to read “mind bending” books. “So what book you got there?” he asked.

You can’t borrow my copy when I’m done, I said, because I just can’t part with this book, but I’m sure you can buy a cheap one online. Or better yet, support your local bookstore. Or better yet, buy it from Melville House publishers, if they carry it. If not, fuck it, and buy a different book from them. They carry good titles.

Somehow, the good former priest and I drifted into the topic of sex. We were both talking too fast — we each had our hands around strong cups of coffee. I think I’d asked him about being a priest, and how it was not being able to touch a woman, or have a wife. And why so many priests resorted to touching boys, instead.

“I don’t enjoy sex all that much, anyway,” he said, “or not what everybody else seems to enjoy about it.” He told me that an attractive woman was an attractive woman was an attractive woman. Then he said that wasn’t meant to sound sexist, and that indeed attractive men were also a dime a dozen.

The priest leaned closer to me, to avoid others overhearing what he was about to say. “I do, however, appreciate a good orgasm.” He winked at me. “A real gusher, as I call them.”

I leaned back. I wasn’t sure why the former priest had left his religious station, and something told me I didn’t want to find out. His breath smelled like coffee. I carried the scent in my nostrils as I re-established my position in my chair. I felt better to have a few more inches between us.

“Don’t be afraid, lad,” he said, “I only mean I find the human body’s orgasm to be a useful spiritual function. I’m a man of God, although I no longer belong to a wicked institution.”

That sounds like my hippie friends who always want to pretend they’re having a lot of promiscuous sex because it’s spiritual, I told him. But I don’t buy it. I think people are just horny. They have nothing better to do. They have underdeveloped minds. And over developed prostates. They have not found anything greater than sex. But I could be wrong, I said.

“I quite agree,” he said. “But let me tell you, whenever I have an orgasm, I shoot a prayer to God. A deep, meaningful prayer.” The priest wiped from his mustache crumbs left over from his blueberry muffin. “I let the sensations wash over me, and then I pray to the Father by visually wishing everything I want in life. Peace for my family, and me too, of course. Spiritual fulfillment, material wealth, and happiness.”

That’s a lot to cram in to an orgasm, I said, unless you know something I don’t.

“It’s all instantaneous,” he said. “I’ve practiced enough to collapse a complex series of visuals to send off like a signal to God during an orgasm. I even throw my wish for a Jaguar sports car in there.”

Some people, I said, think God would be disgusted by your ejaculation. Or ejaculation in general.

He shook his head. “I know people who feel that way. That’s a distortion of scripture, and of God.” The priest took a slow sip of his black coffee. “I use the orgasm to help me focus. During ejaculation, think of where your mind is at. Do you have any thoughts? Are you thinking of your vacation in two weeks? Or what you’ll wear the next day to work? Or what your rude cousin said to you? Or are you intensely focused on the sensation, on your body? It is that concentration in the loins that I have shifted to beam a signal to God.”

Maybe, I said, if the world’s people strove to have an orgasm at the same exact time, and everybody shot prayers of spiritual and material wealth to God, we’d send one hell of a laser beam into the heavens.

The priest chuckled. He had spirit. He was at ease. I could see the prayers during his orgasms had helped. Given him satisfaction. Happiness. Fulfillment.

So what do you drive? I asked. I craned my neck to see out the giant windows. There weren’t any especially glorious cars parked outside. Especially no Jaguars.